Wednesday, May 21, 2008

If it's good enough for Nancy Reagan...

If you want to make something sound serious enough for Joe Sixpack and Suzy Sofaspud to accept as indisputable fact, take a Greek or Latin root word and paste "-ology" on the end of it. Folks have used this to swallow all manner of pseudosciences: phrenology, cryptozoology, Scientology, sociology, psychology and, in this case, astrology.

Here, an article at AOhelL claims that several astrologers have looked at planets, taken calipers to skull bumps, measured tea leaves, weighed life lines, and whatever other nonsense it is they use, and determined that a young charismatic offering a Rorschach-campaign with a content-free message of hope and change can out-demagogue an aging, wavering weathervane with all the charisma of a tub of cold library paste.

For some reason or another, I was looking at the Wikipedia article on Jason Lee the other day, and where it said he's a member of the Church of Scientology, the link led to the Wikipedia article on insanity. I thought, "And I thought people say Wikipedia is inaccurate!" Sadly, it had been changed to direct you to the article on Scientology by the time I went back to show it to my husband.